Directors and playwrights were smart to hold off making key production design decisions until after the script was approved by the minister of culture.

In a theater in cracow I saw a character in a play appear wearing a powder blue blazer identical to the color blazer worn by Soviet Union border guards at that time. When the actor jumped off the stage into the audience to stamp people on the head the theater roared with derisive laughter.

The play was a harsh slam of the state authorities so
how did it get approved by the censors?
Simple. They read the script.

The value of metaphor can be measured by the degree to which it evades capture or search.

But compare that to the people who will follow a link from someone’s blogroll, or from the home page of the PAN, or from an email from a friend, or from the day one of your videos gets to the front page of Digg.

Peter Van Dijck’s vloggercon keynote about how values become embedded in technology is relevant here.

Text search embeds the value that all content is information- or idea-based. This is the same ethic that drives Google’s venture to create a universal digital library. I applaud the effort to increase access to information and ideas trapped in analog books (or worse, out-of-print analog books).

What gets lost are what make fiction, short stories, and poetry relevant. I wouldn’t claim to argue that imaginative literature is somehow qualitatively more important than non-fiction–just that people use it differently. I’m merely positing that for these kinds of works, audiences/readers will need to rely upon people, or technologies that themselves rely upon the input of people, to help identify what they might “also like.”

And yes some of those “people” will be paid shills, or preprogrammed marketingbots, so there’ll be that to deal with.